NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  Our three sojourns to Cagnes in the fifties and sixties were particularly happy times for my family. We were ensconced on the Mediterranean coast and surrounded by a new and very different set of friends and acquaintances—peasants and artists, American expatriates, Scandinavians, British aristocrats both current and fallen. But the culture shock, however mild, led to certain frictions. In particular, it wasn’t an easy move for my mother, who had never been out of the country and spoke no French.

  In “Year of Grace,” a frightened and generally inexperienced small-town woman whose stuffy academic husband has transported her abroad during a year’s sabbatical, discovers, unexpectedly and without a trace of vindictiveness, that there is more to her life than her connection to her husband. Predating the women’s movement by more than a decade, this unstrident portrayal of self-discovery appears as valid today as it did twenty-five years ago. It seems perfectly apropos that it is followed by what might be considered its Gallic counterpart, “The Peacocks of Avignon.” This brief but deeply moving piece tells the story of a young woman whose sorrow and resentment threaten to destroy her otherwise loving relationship with her mother, a widow desperate to make up for the loss of her husband—and her youth—by engaging in an affair with a man half her age. Alone in a foreign country, she discovers, in a sudden and profound moment of revelation, the meaning of forgiveness.

  Although my family spent more than five years in Europe, it was the “seemingly doomed yet endlessly optimistic native land” to which my father always insisted we return. It was America—a country whose political and social mores served as the target for much of his disapprobation—for which he retained his greatest loyalty and deepest affection. It was here that he found his true voice—a voice that spoke out for the great American values, values he felt were all too often perilously ignored by his fellow citizens.

  He was often ahead of his time. His 1959 essay in Esquire, “Why Resign from the Human Race?,” provoked an unprecedented avalanche of mail and is generally acknowledged to have inspired the formation of the Peace Corps. His social concerns were no less apparent in his stories. For example, in “A Chance Encounter,” the issue of abortion, possibly more controversial today than when the story was written, produces a surprising and most unexpected victim. Peopled almost exclusively by male characters, it is a subtle, shrewd, and thought-provoking argument for freedom of choice.

  My father gracefully balanced the larger social and political concerns in his novels and essays with a tender humanism in his stories. The subject of poverty, for example, plays a devastating role in “A Question of Loneliness,” in which an overburdened and underpaid young worker winds up paying dearly for his solitary attempt to rescue his wife from the dreariness of her domestic routine. The cost to him is a future of guilt and recrimination. Their story is sad and chilling.

  “Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn” also presents young people striving to ameliorate their lot in a difficult world, but it takes a far broader and more optimistic (albeit cynical) view of its impoverished group of protagonists. It is a brilliant and stirring novella which might well have served as the progenitor for his long novel, Standing Fast, published in 1970. The product of five years of work, the novel chronicles in painstaking detail the history of the American left between 1939 and 1963.

  “Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn,” much like the later novel, examines people from a variety of social, political, and economic backgrounds whose lives intertwine. Their early ideals will inevitably and even brutally be compromised with the passage of time. The story will seem all the more touching and timely to a new generation of readers whose lives bridged the gap between the turbulent and idealistic sixties and the radically different—and markedly un-radical—eighties. Little has changed in our entry into the rat race; only the price has gone up. One of the most beautiful of all New York stories, “Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn” remains a perfectly compressed portrait not only of the generation of young people struggling to find their way immediately following World War II, but also of what is arguably the world’s most exciting city, so joyously described in the opening sentence as “my mother, my mistress, my Mecca.”

  Manhattan also serves as the setting for “The Dancer,” a pioneering story whose finale was found, in the early fifties, to be so daring and controversial that no literary magazine would accept it for publication; its eventual inclusion in discovery, a paperback collection of new and often experimental fiction, earned it something of a cult status. An extraordinary, hallucinogenic tale that veers off in surprising and unexpected directions, it is filled with a series of bizarre, feverishly surreal images. The point of view is that of twenty-one-year-old Peter Chifley, who leaves his hometown of Elyria, Ohio, to pursue his dream of becoming a dancer. What happens to him upon his arrival in New York provides a truly horrifying portrait of innocence lost, and if Peter seems to be too good to be true, this may say more about the age in which we live than it does about our perceptions of him—an artist destroyed by a shattered dream.

  It is no accident that there are more than a proportionate number of stories here about artists. My father’s predilections were hardly limited to literature; his passion for music was particularly acute, and he surrounded himself by the sound of it all day. Highly disciplined, he rarely deviated from his routine of waking each morning at seven and getting to his typewriter by eight, even on weekends or holidays. At the same time, it was equally rare for him to work past five. He often relaxed with a late-afternoon Scotch and an attempt to stumble through a prelude or two on the piano. He was better at the flute. The frequent harp-and-flute duets my sister, Felice, played with him—which sometimes turned into trios if by good fortune my brother, Marco, joined them at the piano—brought out the best in my father. They are some of the loveliest (and frequently most hilarious) memories of my childhood.

  Just as those ensembles were inspired by a musical give-and-take, so the crescendos and diminuendos of my father’s people echo throughout the stories in this collection. We find those echoes in “The Man in the Toolhouse,” when Harry the violinist is wooing Rita the harpist; in “A Glance in the Mirror,” when rueful bandleader Roy Farrow finally gathers the courage to redress the grievances of his daughter, Kate, an aspiring cellist; in the friends and lovers of “Where Does Your Music Come From?,” a beautiful and bittersweet remembrance of the evolution and dissipation of childhood friendships, the tentative stirrings of romance, and the tragedy of war. All are recorded here with the clarity and complexity of a prism hung in a sunlit window.

  And then there are stories dealing with writers. It is always easier, I think, to reflect on careers in art other than your own, and if the characters in my father’s belletristic gallery seem collectively tinged with the pain that is an inevitable part of the literary sensibility, they are also bathed in the warmth of his obvious affection and admiration for them. Long before I had decided on a writing career, for example, “The Hack” affected me profoundly as a particularly delicate and devastating morality tale. It is a writer’s story of a writer’s story of a writer’s false stories, and its subject is the cost of artistic integrity, a lesson learned in an instant of unintentionally inflicted pain. Harold Banks, the hack of the title, is both hero and victim and one of my father’s most vivid and memorable creations—a pathetic, chain-smoking raconteur who weaves not the fabric of life but merely fabrication. Not only the most unforgettable character ever met by Tommy, the story’s young narrator, he becomes unforgettably one of ours too—a man at once tragic and noble.

  “A Story for Teddy” has as its narrator a successful writer looking back on an early incident in his career—in this case his frustrated but well-intentioned passion for Teddy, a beautiful and innocent young woman from the Bronx. Years later, the narrator stands in a windy, empty parking lot, ruefully pondering the affair that was shattered in a single excoriating moment of misguided morality. His recollection stands in melancholic contrast to the soft and lingering
image of the story’s young lovers who are “yearning for everything but understanding nothing.”

  “The Man in the Toolhouse” was written at a time when my father found himself beckoned by Hollywood during his year as Visiting Professor at San Francisco State College. The overtures made to and rejected by him may well have served as the story’s inspiration. This is a lacerating portrait of an unpublished but nonetheless self-assured writer whose long and determined struggle on the road to success proves a far greater source of continuing creative motivation than any of its subsequent rewards. A somber reflection on the potential hazards of selling out, “The Man in the Toolhouse” is my father’s moral and professional tribute to his fictional hero, whose personal triumph is quite possibly the triumph of his creator’s as well.

  “My Coney Island Uncle” and “The Tree of Life” serve as a fitting conclusion to the collection. Delicately constructed, the two stories belong together, like a set of faded photographs found by accident. They trace, over a period of some thirty years, the touching and sentimental history of a young boy’s love for his favorite uncle. It is a voyage from childhood to adulthood and back, at once magical and dismaying, as it gently but inexorably wends its way to a heartrending conclusion. Separately or together, these last two tales perfectly encapsulate my father’s warmth and generosity of spirit. They bring to mind two sections from his first and last novels. In Out Went the Candle, he wrote:

  Even if some unimaginable disaster were to wipe forever from his memory the rare and beautiful moments of the past, the girls locked in his arms, the great cities of Europe opened to his senses, the books discovered and treasured, the ravishing music played for his own delight, the sudden revelations of humanity in simple people, there would still be with him forever, until the day he died, those other memories of mankind at the end of its rope. They were the core of his apple of knowledge, whose sharp almost unbearable taste would remain on his lips long after even the recollection of the fruit’s flesh had faded.

  And in Celebration, completed only days before my father’s death, Samuel Lumen, the novel’s ninety-year-old hero, writes in his diary:

  I used to think that the unique quality of great age lay in its beautiful challenge to refine, to purify, to discover simplicity. Now that suddenly I am terribly old, I have the uneasy feeling that I had been romanticizing, out of ignorance. Because nothing seems simple to me now. Everything is complex, mysterious, impure, starting with my own motives and conduct…

  These are not only the prescient visions of a man who seemed often to care more about others than he did about himself. They also serve, now, as a fitting set of prologues to the stories that follow. Where did my father’s music come from? From the heart—written though it was on the shores of Panama, or in the fields of Provence, or the gardens of Brooklyn. It came from an age not long ago, and yet seemingly so distant, when messages were scrawled passionately on pieces of paper and slipped under the door; when luxury was synonymous with a cab ride on a rainy afternoon; and when music was listened to high on the steps of Lewisohn Stadium. It was another time. And just as the music of another era has the power to ignite a long-forgotten memory, to rekindle a feeling long since thought lost, so do these stories have the power to haunt, to bring tears, to astonish, and to delight.

  —ROBIN SWADOS

  New York, June 1986

  WITH LOVE FOR

  MARCO AND ROBIN

  FELICE AND RICK

  AND

  BERYL AND MEGAN

  MIRANDA AND JULIA

  NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS

  OF BROOKLYN

  There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca, when I could no more have wanted to live any place else than I could have conceived of myself as a daddy, disciplining my boy and dandling my daughter. I was young, the war (the one that ended in 1945, the only one that will ever be “the war” for people my age) was just over, and I was free.

  I had graduated from college in 1943, a bad year for nostalgia or avowals of future reunions. And a bad year for me, because my older brother was killed in North Africa and my widowed father dropped dead four weeks before I got my degree, all alone. I said goodbye to my roommate, my best friend and almost-brother, Barney Meltzer, and entered the ready embrace of the United States Army. Then came several new varieties of education, including the unlearning of my undergraduate radical platitudes in Mississippi, England, Normandy. From there on I sweated it out, was frightened, shot, got shot at, was finally felled by shrapnel, and so acquired enough points to graduate from the army. I headed for New York City from Europe like a bee or a pigeon or a youth who knew what he knew and wanted, hungrily, to find out what he could do with it. It was so inconceivable that there could be any other place but New York to find out that I distinctly remember wondering, strolling the bright and unblasted streets, why it was that all the other American cities weren’t depopulated now that their young people were free once again to get up and do as they pleased without governments or uniforms to stop them.

  I had mustering-out money, all the time I could use, and the desire for a little more privacy than I was permitted in a Seventy-third Street rooming house. So I arose every morning at dawn to prowl; and one of these mornings I saw a lady putting out an Apartment to Let sign to start out her day on Remsen Street, in Brooklyn Heights. I went up the stoop, admired the two rooms and bath, was admired as a wounded ex-G.I., assured her that the absence of a kitchen was compensated for by the view of the scraggly garden below, paid my two months’ security, and walked out smiling into the winter sunlight and through the line that was just forming to appeal for the apartment—my apartment, the key in my pocket.

  It was only after you had found a place to live that you faced the questions of how to live and what to do for a living. A couple I knew gave up good music-teaching jobs in Oregon simply because an uncle in Manhattan wired that he was holding a three-room apartment for them. They came rushing back to the apartment and no jobs, they were weak with joy, and they threw a party that I didn’t recover from for three days. That was what New York meant to us then.

  I wasn’t lonely, even though I lived alone and had almost no relatives. I drifted. One day I thought of being a movie actor or maybe director, and made inquiries about studying the medium on the G.I. Bill (I was sour on the idea of going back to college), another day I considered starting an avant-garde music magazine, and from time to time it occurred to me that it might be fun to become rich and patronize the arts in my leisure hours. What I needed was a stabilizer, but not something that would choke off the daydreams. After nosing around in search of work that would not be one big solemn lump of responsibility and commitment, I found it.

  I got a job ringing doorbells for the Census Bureau, working out of the old Federal Building on Christopher Street, at the far west corner of Greenwich Village. I knew from the start that it was right for me, even though it involved interviewing strangers and asking them personal questions. The office atmosphere was relaxed, and all of the enumerators—with the exception of two dowdy, money-hungry housewives—were young veterans like me, mostly not looking to climb the civil service ladder but rather wanting a pay check while they thought about becoming poets, accountants, actors, even merchants. They were tall and cadaverous former first lieutenants, short, panting privates happily stuffed with momma’s blintzes again, and nondescript exnoncoms like me, still wearing out the remnants, khaki socks and undershirts, of government issue. It took a while to sort them out, longer than the few days of indoctrination and hero-sandwich lunches that we ate en masse, jammed in, laughing and quarreling, at the Italian grocery down the block.

  Just as I was beginning to, I was given my portfolio and shipped out into “the field” (bureaucratic abstraction for meeting the human race face to face). So it was that I found myself swaying out to Coney Island on the BMT, staring anxiously up the parted thighs of squat, somber women opposite me, scared stiff of ringing my first doorbell.<
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  To be honest, I can’t remember the first. All too soon they tended to merge, to become anonymous: warm women in warm kitchens, cold men in cold hallways, friendly mouths, lonely eyes, suspicious hateful glares, little brown faces, broad black faces, narrow white faces. What I did learn was something of which the unimaginably monotonous years of enforced barracks existence had made me skeptical: the immense and unquenchable variety of human nature. After the early uncertain days, after I had hardened myself somewhat to rudeness and rebuff and, more important, to undecorated peacetime misery willingly displayed to my stranger’s eyes, I looked forward to getting up each morning and going out into the streets. What would I find? Whom would I meet?

  For one thing I met Pauline. Not, as perhaps I should have, on the wind-blown top of a double decker (although for a time they continued to make their majestic elephantine way, snout to tail, up Fifth Avenue, with me seated on the front bench swaying, as I shall never forget even when I am an old man, in the howdah high above the gilded scene like the richest rajah in the world). No, it was in the sooty Seventh Avenue subway, she with her briefcase, I with my portfolio.

  She was deep in Partisan Review. That was what first caught my eye, that and her legs. The girls were wearing their skirts short—it was just before the New Look came in—and her nyloned knees, pressed firmly together as were her little feet in mahogany loafers, gleamed at the points as though they had been sculptured and burnished. I wanted to stroke them. That a girl with legs like that would be reading Partisan! Our eyes met once, briefly, as she glanced up impersonally at me hanging from the strap above her; I lacked the nerve to smile. But when a seat became vacant at her side I took it.